The Icon (7 page)

“So you want me to tell Ms. Kessler to donate the work to the Greek church?”

Fotis’ eyes widened. “I see, you are afraid of defrauding her. No, the church is quite willing to pay. Of course, they might win the work in a lawsuit, but proving the theft and tracing the crooked path of ownership could take years, and cost as much in lawyers as it would take to buy the piece in the first place. They will make her an offer, perhaps not as much as she wants, but a fair offer, I have no doubt. And she is rich, so I would not be overly concerned about that.”

“But you want me to talk her into it.”

“To advise her, let her know your own heart on the matter. The rest will follow.”

Matthew rose slowly, resisting the urge to swear, kick the bench, simply walk away. Instead he just stood there beside the shrunken old man.

“What are you up to?”

“What have I to do with it, my child? The situation is what it is. Fate chooses her own weapons.”

Weapons, not tools, Matthew mused. He tried to think of himself as a weapon of fate. What a joke.

“Fate didn’t bring me into this. You did.”

“Am I not also an instrument? You were meant to be involved.”

“That’s a simple formula for justifying any damn thing you like, isn’t it? That must make life very easy.”

In fact, Fotis’ life had been anything but easy, and Matthew did not hope to either understand or undermine his philosophy. Yet his godfather seemed unperturbed, serene; infuriatingly so.

“It is called faith, and it is available to anyone. You need not be your father’s son.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“Nothing, my boy. It was a foolish thing to say. I apologize.”

They had both misspoken, and silence followed. Matthew walked the pond’s edge. The water was clear, springtime-fresh, with no dead leaves or debris. He could see the worn concrete shelf, then the bottom. This was Matthew’s backyard, this whole section of park south of the museum to Seventy-second Street, the place he came to walk off stress, absorb a loss, get his head together. This was the very spot he would have chosen to contemplate the troubling revelation now before him. Yet here he was, and there was no comfort. He watched the still water and the vibrant spring light, smelled the damp earth, without emotion, without any reaction at all. An invisible screen seemed to have gone up between himself and the world. He would like to blame it on the conversation with Fotis, but that wasn’t right. Had the feeling not been with him for the last two days, only now crystallizing? Could he not place it almost to the moment he stood before the icon, the dark eyes holding him, Ana Kessler’s words, her breath, in his ear? And since then work, conversation, the necessary chores of life hummed like one long, dull interruption until he could think about the icon again, talk about it, see it. He wandered back to Fotis. The older man seemed far away in thought until Matthew began to sit.

“No, time to walk again. I have kept you too long. Help me up.”

They continued north along the narrow path to the bridge below Cedar Hill, at ease once more in their manner, if not their minds. Matthew waited for a continued assault, but his companion was quiet, attention directed inward. Suppressing new pain, perhaps, or focusing his energy to finish the walk. Bright strips on the ceiling lit the short tunnel. A heap of clothing against the wall became, on closer inspection, a homeless man, sleeping or expired.

“If the church were to get it,” Matthew began in mid-thought,

“where would they put it?”

“We have not spoken in that sort of detail. I cannot ask them such things unless I am ready to support them if the answer is agreeable. And I cannot support them at all without you. So tell me what answer would make you happy.”

“I’d just want to be sure it wasn’t going to end up in a vault, or on some bishop’s wall. That it would be somewhere the public could see it.”

“Then we make that a condition of our involvement.”

“I don’t see how we can set conditions. I don’t intend to talk Ms. Kessler into anything.”

“But if she asks your advice, you will give it?”

“I have to think about all this.”

“That is the wise course.”

Dogs frolicked with their masters on the wide, sloping hillside above. To the north, through trees and across the Seventy-ninth Street transverse rose the massive concrete and glass south wall of the museum. A path bisected the one they were on, running up Cedar Hill to their left and out to Fifth Avenue on their right. Fotis would take this path to where his driver—one of the Russians, Anton or Nicholas—waited on the avenue. Obeying some unspoken rule, Matthew never accompanied him to the car, but did watch to see that he made it safely to the street.

“I will leave you to your work.” Fotis took both of the younger man’s hands in his own. “Do not let your thoughts be troubled. The correct decision will come to you if your mind is at peace. God keep you, my boy.”

“Take care,
Theio.”

A squeeze of fingers and the old man was off, slow but steady in his gait, never looking back. Matthew stood fixed in that little intersection until long after his godfather was out sight.

Jan placed the guidebook, open to the section on Central Park, facedown on the bench and waited for the old man to pass by. The younger one still stood there, fifty meters away, looking in his direction. Unlikely that he had noticed anything, Jan decided, merely making sure the old fellow was all right. He reached into his pocket and put his hand around the cool metal object, slipped it out carefully. One shot would do it, but two or three were protocol, in the back of the skull and between and just below the shoulder blades. That is, if this were a gun and not a cell phone.

Of course this was a terrible spot, far too many people and no cover. One of the three short tunnels they had passed through would be a better choice, especially if it were a rainy or cloudy day, a good bet in April in New York. But he might have to take out the younger one as well. Better still would be between the car and the house out in Queens. Well, best to have several options. He could inform del Carros that it would be no problem. The dealer would assume he was being nonchalant, having already pronounced the Greek a difficult target, but in truth Jan anticipated little trouble, even with the Russian bodyguards. He wouldn’t mind adding them in; he hated Russians.

No messages. He put the phone away and picked up the guidebook again. Over 300 species of birds seen in the park every year, including the green heron and scarlet tanager. Amazing. Jan shook his head in wonder at the natural world.

D
ust motes hung in the white shafts of light between the stacks, and Matthew had to work hard not to become hypnotized, not to let his imagination run wild with the strange reports on the pages before him. Down the hall in his office the red message light blinked on his telephone—the idiot lawyer for that potential donor in Chicago, no doubt. Memos from Nevins, the chief curator, from Carol and the planning committee, the director, Legal, all crowded his e-mail inbox, but Matthew was ignoring them. He was holed up instead in the department library, with the old volumes that held the few fragments of available knowledge on the Kessler icon.

An Internet search revealed nothing on so obscure a subject. There was nothing dependable from Byzantine sources, either, no way to trace the icon back to its place and moment of creation. The only clues were to be found in the image itself. The bottom of the work was so damaged that he hadn’t been able to tell for certain whether there might once have been a depiction of the Christ child there, to whom Mary’s badly chipped hands should be directing the viewer. This would place the image squarely in the
hodegetria
style, “She who shows the way,” one of the most favored and oldest iconic traditions, based on an original painted by Saint Luke himself, according to popular myth. But the placement of the hands and the half turn to the right of the entire figure—more likely to direct the viewer’s attention
outside
the frame—seemed to place the image more in the
hagiasoritissa
tradition. This series was associated with the relic of Mary’s hood or sash, brought back from the Holy Land by Saint Helena in the fourth century and placed in a reliquary, above which the prototype of this image would have hung.

There were some arguments against this identification. The Katarini icon looked the viewer dead in the eye, instead of following the hand gestures to the right, where an icon of Jesus would generally accompany it. However, Matthew knew other images in the tradition which also broke that rule. A bigger stumbling block was that the style hadn’t really become popular until the mid-tenth century, and the Katarini icon was certainly older than that, maybe much older. Yet who was to say the style hadn’t existed earlier? Perhaps previous versions had all been destroyed in the iconoclasm of the eighth century. Indeed, Matthew thought, allowing the long-suppressed conjecture which had been building within him all morning to come forward, who was to say this image was not the long-lost prototype itself? The first of its kind, the inspiration for all that followed?

A shiver passed through his arms as the notion seized him. He fought this sudden agitation, assuring himself that the religious significance of such a find meant little to him. It would, though, mean a great deal to others, like the church officials who had contacted Fotis. Even as an art historical identification it would be impressive indeed—career-making, perhaps. Alas, unless further evidence came to light from some hidden source, it would remain forever a theory. Meantime, if he would never know for certain from where the Holy Mother had sprung, or how it made its eventual way to Epiros, at least he could review the traces of evidence regarding its time there.

The catalogs of the great art critics of centuries past had little room for Eastern Orthodox, and when it was included, it was always the same handful of icons: the sixth-century Peter, Mary, and Christ Pantokrator at Saint Catherine’s in Sinai; some later pieces of Theophanes and Rublev in Russia; the Vladimir Virgin; a few others. Considering its placement in the rugged hills of Greece, not to mention the vast number of works in that country claiming special spiritual status, the Katarini Holy Mother’s becoming known at all had to count as nearly miraculous. The first mention Matthew could discover was from the English adventurer Thomas Hall, who traveled all over Greece and Turkey in the 1780s. Hall’s highly fanciful travelogues included, among many unlikely reports, one of the “Holy Mother of Epiros” (as if there were only one Holy Mother icon in the whole region), described as “more scratched wood than paint, except for the very lovely face of the Virgin” and as “curing blindness in true-hearted souls at a touch of its worn wood, but striking blind those of an evil or avaricious nature.” This followed the story of the levitating monks of Metéora and directly preceded that of the miraculous vision of Christ in the peasant wife’s washcloth. Matthew always had a good laugh reading Hall.

Lord Byron, on his first, nonfatal sojourn in Greece in 1809, made mention of a miraculous Holy Mother icon possessed by the Muslim tyrant Ali Pasha, who was already old but vigorous in mind and body, and would remain so until his death at the hands his Turkish overlords in 1822. Again, the description was very close to the Katarini icon, and Byron reported a strange golden aura about the work. Matthew shook his head. If I drank as much as you, Georgie boy, he thought, I’d see auras around paintings too.

The last volume on the table, however, was the one that troubled him most. Johann Mayer-Goff was a traveler of the late nineteenth century and a self-trained specialist on Orthodox art. The German was a sober, stolid, even somewhat boring writer, at least in translation, not given to hyperbole or floating monks. He was the first to name the village of Katarini as the residence of the icon, and he had attended the feast of the Annunciation in that same old church which Fotis’ man burned down sixty years later. The day was rainy, Mayer-Goff wrote, and only candlelight illuminated the dank stone sanctuary:

Matthew began to see dark spots on the page and realized that he had not taken a breath in many moments. Inhaling deeply, he then exhaled an embarrassed laugh. Get a grip on yourself, buddy.

“There you are.”

He looked up to see his older colleague Carol Voss standing before the table, and slapped shut the volume of Mayer-Goff as if he’d been caught by his mother reading
Penthouse.

“Here I am, indeed.”

“Not answering your e-mails,” she scolded gently, her green eyes behind large glasses looking him over carefully. Carol was a mentor of sorts, his only close friend at the museum, and there was little he could keep from her.

“It’s not just yours I’m ignoring, if that makes you feel better.”

“This about the Kessler icon?” she waved at the books on the table.

“Yes.”

“Checking provenance?”

“More or less. It’s sketchy.”

“Are we serious about this?” she asked skeptically.

“Are you pretending that I would know that better than you, Ms. Finger-on-the-Director’s-pulse?”

She laughed. “I haven’t a clue. Nevins seems excited.”

“Yeah, but he’s up at the Cloisters every day. I don’t even know if he’s spoken to Fearless Leader.”

“Speak to him yourself.”

“We don’t have that kind of relationship.”

“You seem worried,” she said, out of nowhere. “Are there ownership issues?”

“Maybe,” he conceded, in a barely audible tone.

“Have we filed with the Art Loss Register?”

“Not yet. We need to be a little more certain we want it, right? Besides, if there’s a theft involved, it isn’t going to show up there. It would be older.”

The phrase “wartime loot” hung in the air between them, unspoken. Carol clearly thought of saying more, and Matthew found himself wishing she would, wishing for someone upon whom to unburden himself. She squeezed his shoulder instead.

“Good luck, kiddo. Tell me if you want help. And Matthew, I know this is a fantastic piece and all, but it’s just one piece. It’s not your whole life.”

Calling Benny Ezraki was a long shot. The card with the message service number was years old, and Andreas did not know if Benny was alive, much less still in the business of finding people, but he was unquestionably the right man for the job if he would take it. There was no recorded voice, just a tone. Andreas left his name and the hotel number, and ten minutes later his old Israeli contact called back. Andreas could stop by his new office, if he liked, but he might not approve of it. The old man knew he was being baited but agreed to go there anyway.

The name on the door was for a travel agency, and indeed the posters of Turkey and Egypt on the walls and the efficient young women with their headsets seemed to confer legitimacy. But that was only the first floor. The second, reached by a long stairway, consisted of narrow corridors and closed doors, and the barely dressed, boldly casual women smoking in the small lounge completed the picture. They all smiled at Andreas and pointed to the office in back.

Benny met him with a bear hug, which seamlessly segued into a frisk. Habit, he apologized. The wily Greek Jew still looked younger than his age, which must be late fifties, though he seemed a little beaten down and tired. The beard was graying faster then the hair, the huge shoulders were more hunched, the pouches beneath the gentle brown eyes were more pronounced. The office had a view of the alley, a large computer monitor on the table, and a Pissarro calendar on the wall. The light was poor, and the cramped space was shrouded in blue cigarette smoke.

“Did you really expect me to be shocked by this place?”

“I was hoping so; you Athenians are all prudes. But I forget you are a man of the world.”

“This is your new business?”

The big man sucked on a cigarette as if his life depended upon it, blew smoke just to the left of Andreas’ face. He seldom smiled, even when he was kidding around.

“Always the same business. Travel, marketing, whores, it’s all about information. I don’t know why I didn’t think of this years ago. You wouldn’t believe the kinds of things these girls find out.”

Andreas, a connoisseur of human nature, found it very easy to believe.

“Are they safe?”

“A doctor checks them every month. You want to try one?”

“That is not what I’m asking.”

“I don’t give them sensitive stuff. Mostly names. Send them around to the hotels whose databases we can’t hack. But they always come back with stories. You know, blackmail is not my thing, but if it were I could make a fortune.”

“You’re too casual for that kind of work; you would get yourself killed.”

“Maybe you’re right.”

“Can we speak freely? Is the Israeli ambassador in the next room?”

“We get very little traffic in here,” Benny replied, the battered ergonomic chair groaning beneath his shifting weight. “Mostly we send out. Like Chinese food. This isn’t a bordello.”

“No?”

“No, we’re an escort service. These aren’t even the prime girls.”

“Not so loud.”

“The prime girls wait at home for the phone to ring. We screen it, make sure it’s safe, get the credit card number, send them out.”

“All in the name of information.”

“That’s my business.”

“Excellent. I’m looking for someone.”

Benny twisted awkwardly to reach the ashtray on his cluttered desk, mashed out one Gauloises, and immediately lit another.

“Aren’t you retired?”

“For years.”

“But never completely, right?”

“I kept my hand in for a while. Until the idiots brought Papandreou back. That was the end.”

“Papandreou, Mitsotakis, not much to choose from there. This new one seems like a decent fellow. Now our Israeli politicians—”

“We’re not discussing politicians, Benny.” Andreas sensed a brush-off in the other man’s tone. “This is unofficial business. A favor. I’m reduced to asking favors these days. You can refuse after you hear what it is, but please let us not talk politics. That’s for old men in cafés.”

“Why would I refuse you?”

“Because there is nothing in it for you. Except my gratitude.”

“And gratitude is such a small thing these days? I think I can judge best what is in my own interests.”

Andreas pursed his lips and nodded. He’d hit the correct spot, but he must not push it.

“Years ago you helped me with something.”

“God defend us, are you chasing Nazis again?”

“The same one.”

“He’s dead.”

“No, he’s here.”

Benny looked at him hard. “You are certain?”

“Yes.”

This was risky. He had only Fotis’ word about Müller, which he would never normally trust uncorroborated. Yet his instinct told him it must be so, had been telling him since before he left Greece. If he was wrong, it was a cruel trick. Benny’s parents had been taken in the Salonika deportation in 1943 and died at Auschwitz. Müller may or may not have been involved, but he was a German officer in Salonika at the time, and that had been good enough for Benny thirty years before. He had been the one Mossad analyst to throw Andreas some leads, and the two had played straight with each other since then. They were both, by nature, careful about facts, and Andreas did not say he was certain of a thing unless he was.

“But you don’t know exactly where he is.”

“That’s what I need you to tell me.”

“Then how do you know he’s here?”

“I have been informed.”

“A dependable source, I hope.”

“I’ll pay you. So you’re not wasting your time.”

“Been hoarding your drachmas? Well, when a Greek agrees to pay, he must be pretty certain. But then it’s not a favor.”

“We can dispense with favors. Or you can refuse me, but don’t toy with an old man.”

Benny put up his hands in surrender, leaned over to get another cigarette, then realized he hadn’t finished the one in the ashtray. He was more agitated than he would let on.